1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to integrated supply chain systems and more particularly to attribute based inventory usage and inventory stocking.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, in integrated supply chain manufacturing systems, customers access an order management system to place product orders via a user interface, e.g., via a computer in communication with the Internet. Upon the generation of a valid order, a production configure to order (CTO) process is performed. CTO orders identify the parts or components that are needed for manufacturing of a certain product. These parts or components are stocked in various storage locations until identified and pulled for usage in the products.
Many manufacturing processes can create attributes e.g. pre-tested, microcode, activations, loaner units, etc., that differentiate parts, and thus, all parts with a given part number and/or engineering change (EC) number are not necessarily equivalent. However, current industry standard inventory systems continue to treat a part number as an absolute and therefore, lack visibility with respect to the attributes associated with a part number. As a result, current industry inventory systems are unable to determine if any different manufacturing activities should occur as a consequence of one or more part attributes. Manufacturers' attempts to stock, allocate and/or prioritize parts with associated attributes have met with little success. Consequently, numerous problems are encountered such as excess inventory as the wrong part attributes are used in the wrong manufacturing application, incorrect shipments due to loss of control of the attributes of a part, loss in warranty by accidentally overusing pre-tested/run-time parts, increased scrap when mistakes are found, additional cost and space requirements in an attempt to perform complete physical separation for inventory management.
One proposed solution is to generate a new part number and re-label the part each time the attributes of that part change. Such a “re-part numbering” scheme would result in an explosion of part numbers for every combination of attributes. For example, if the number of attributes identified for a particular part was five, this would result in a total of thirty-two part numbers. Instead, assume the number of attributes identified for a particular part was ten; this would result in a total of one thousand twenty-four part numbers. Consequently, the effort and resources required to support a full “re-part numbering” scheme is not practical.
Another proposed solution is to provide serialized tracking on all parts. A significant increase in workload would result for the handling and/or scanning of each and every part for every related material event. Some systems attempt to provide attribute labels on all parts and then manually determine if the part is valid for a particular use based on the identified attributes. There are numerous drawbacks with the use of such attribute labels, such as the labels are not always placed on the parts, many labels will fall off, and/or the labels may not updated as attributes change.
Still another proposed solution is for complete physical separation based on part number attributes. However, such a physical separation scheme does not support multiple attributes on a part and if it did, it would result in an explosion of required stocking locations.